Dear Commons Community,

The Mitt Romney campaign has had a bad couple of weeks.  First, there was the rather so-so Republican National Convention with Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair.  This was followed by the Democratic National Convention with Bill Clinton wowing the country.   Then we had Mitt Romney’s less than presidential comments after the Egyptian and Libyan protests during which four Americans were killed in Benghazi. And the latest is Mitt Romney on video dissing 47% of the American people.

The video shows Mitt Romney at a private fund-raiser where he felt free to speak candidly about his campaign and how he would conduct a presidency.  As a New York Times editorial described it:

“In that safe zone, Mr. Romney spoke with a bone-chilling cynicism and a revolting smugness. If he is elected, he said, capital will come back and “we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.” That’s the state of trickle-down economics in the 21st century.

Gone was the pretense that he will be a president of all Americans. Mr. Romney rather neatly divided the country between the people who matter and the 47 percent he does not care about.

To Mr. Romney, that 47 percent consists of people who do not make enough money to be required to pay federal income tax. They are freeloaders, he said, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” It is not his job, he said, as a candidate nor apparently as president if he is elected, “to worry about those people.”

Assuming the Democrats do not shoot themselves in the foot with some outrage of their own, Mitt Romney will have to do incredibly well in the debates in the October to revitalize his sinking campaign.

Tony